Knowing at the Boundaries: Land Ownership Mapping as a Design Approach

Transcript

work uh that TDF is built on. Lots of legal engineering to protect the commons uh permanently while being able to implement in varying jurisdictions uh all protected by Swiss association law uh and I assume many other things. Uh I'm sorry I didn't come very prepared uh to introducing you. Uh but yes, please uh give a hand uh for Charlie. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Let me just get a little set up.

So in preparing for this conversation, I have in assembling maybe 13 years of of work at a time when I'm moving on to some other things. And so what I'm talking about today is a sort of part two to what Claraara was introducing around uh housing. Um, but a lot of what I will include in this came around 10 years ago. So, it's a reflection of a period of time that ran from about 2013. Um, and so you'll see you hopefully you'll kind of catch the threads that run through it, but it goes through uh the experiences that came before it as I was a community housing kind of facilitator traveling around England in

people's front rooms in pubs and shops and talking to them about how they might preserve their their high street or build affordable housing. And that led me through into a PhD. And so then I started to formulate this into theory and to to bring a very large number of case studies and then I'll finalize this in some of the things that I've been working on more recently um particularly a new project um working with a group in South Africa working from here but the groups in South Africa around uh land title security um for informal settlements in Cape Town. So there's some kind of steps between these three stages that I'll try and make clear as we go through them, but there's a lot of cases. There's a

lot of ideas in here and hopefully you'll just sort of float through it with me and then we can go through it in conversation afterwards. We can return to any of the bits. So I caged this conversation on mapping initially. We're in the future living week. Um my research has always been around collaborative housing, mostly community land trusts, helping people set up very long horizon trusts um with citizen groups, but then later with uh local municipalities on a much larger scale. You'll see some of those examples, but I put it into maps because mapping has been a big part of my process as I've been been working through this. I always start with understanding ownership uh some long histories of how people have used it,

treated these places and within it where maps come in there's so much more depth and time that comes than the boundary that you can see. Um and that's often forgotten. It's often a key part of this is that when people start to realize that something's happening, it's a lagging indicator that they start to do something when they're about to lose something, but really you're six months away from when the real decision was made. and in some cases decades before. So I'll try to really kind of go into that a little bit, but there's some technical parts which is covenants uh kind of legal structures, some institutions that may have involved.

It's really important who owned land and not just the current owner but ownership over many decades. The his long kind of tale histories, but also cultures, how the soil's been treated, uh where people have got their association to it. Do they walk dogs there? Was it an important place that they learned to play some kind of musical instrument or recorded something for the first time? These connections make a big part of how much attention a piece of land gets. And an illustration from quite a long time ago, 2014, I I was part of a group mapping land ownership all across Oxfordshire, which is where I was living. uh we mapped 77% of the land mostly by hand and then later with data

analysts. It would be much faster today. But at the time we were sitting down. It was part of the process really sitting down and going through registries going through old maps especially the uh 1-inch maps that had gone out of their um their IP their protections so that we could use them. So we can see over time how has this changed in this particular place and it's a place that is marked by enclosures. In England the enclosures mostly had finished by around 1890. This is bits of land that over around 600 years people had been moved away from their common land away from farming into cities at the beginning as as the kind of opening stages of the industrial revolution. And during this enclosure, very large pieces of land became owned

by the church, by by the by the state um but also through entities like Oxbridge. Oxford and Cambridge own land in all over the country. And so we were seeing where and it's quite small here, but where are very large landed estates, the yellow ones. Um where do you have university and college, these big red ones around the city? Um and Oxford has a big green belt, a big area that you can't develop. So there's this forward planning element that these institutions are using this kind of land ownership as a kind of golden ring around these towns and cities. This happens all around the world that very long-minded organizations hold large pieces of land when they know that places are going to

grow and then use that in order to develop their own aims. So in the case of Oxford uh university, this is charitable aims where they were involved in the formation of the idea of charities for educational purposes where the students are involved but this is very expensive land and they're using it to develop um income. They're private companies often they're private development companies with a educational purpose at the front. And as we went through that, we started to tell stories of what that ownership means. In Oxford, and you can I put the I'll share these afterwards, but I put QR codes here and there. Um, in Oxford, the outside of the city may be owned by

Oxford colleges, these very wealthy colleges, um, with huge endowments. The the largest in Oxford is a 1 billion endowment, St. John's. It's probably much bigger now, 10 years later. Uh, and there's 36 colleges. So there's like repetitions of these very large wealthy entities. Um but then what you see stacking behind them with the same idea is an investor class. You've got billionaires that are buying land outside of these cities uh both in Oxford and Cambridge. So there's this second layer of kind of planning using the same approaches as the previous institutional layer that came in Oxford's case from a thousand years before and exists will see itself existing for the next thousand years.

These very long long view entities And when it comes to citizens playing this role, developing housing, which is the the real theme of this talk, um they're engaged in the same system. There's no othering in this. There's no different sides. They're all working with the same materials. They're working with a planning system. They're working with the same finances. They're organizing people with the same emotions. Um but they're working with different parts of that. And so what I won't make in claims of this is that it's them versus us. That we're all in this system and and through some of the groups the thread that runs through my work is that everybody becomes marketatized in this maybe a part part

for the conversation. Um but it's an unhappy truth as well when thinking about trying to change the way something like housing's done that because we're assembling that from the pieces of the existing we're also then becoming marketized ourselves through this process. It's important to understand that from my perspective because there's something you can do by recognizing it. And this came quite clearly through um a scheme I worked on in 2016 trying to buy a large piece of land to the north of the city in Oxford uh for 260 homes proposed as a self-build uh quarter uh modeled on some of the West German quarters from the 90s and with a large land trust working with the city council

for the affordable housing quotas. Um, and in making this bid, it was a good learning. This was 2016, a good learning in how these kinds of uh, bids go and how the deal making goes afterwards. So, we were funded by a high netw worth individual who put down the sum for the deposit. We knew this piece of land was worth 15 million pounds at the time in order to do affordable housing, local transport, uh so green transport, energy facilities at the local level. Um we had an agent at the time from the landowner side who was trying to push it up higher immediately above 70 million. So we

already knew 17 million. We already knew that that would have an effect on all the other things that are required for this site. Second round, the land owners agent said, we're now taking offers in excess of 22 million. So now we're at the realm of really a lot of things are lost between 15 million and 22 million for a piece of land. It really affects what you can do later. These decisions matter. The amounts that you pay at the point of the bid. And as it went through the we lost, we came third in this um in this scheme. We ended up pushing our amount up a little bit higher. And when we lost, I went back to this person that had backed the deposit. And they were really frustrated by the situation because they weren't in

it with the short term in mind. They weren't in it to lose this bid. They were seeing this as a hundred-year proposal that whatever the situation was, winning at that moment was the important bit and we'd sort it out afterwards. And actually what happened with the person that won this or the organization that won this, they stalled the process. They got their lawyers in the next weeks. They ended up taking finance from other entities linked to the land owner. A and took years to get the first homes which was a suite of million pound homes on the front. No affordable housing to be seen initially.

uh they made a case for the how the health care center wasn't possible because they'd done small polls around uh trying to find doctors that might want to run it here and then there was no healthcare center. So you like these kinds of decisions made from the point of view of a charity in this case trying to get the most money but that being a misrepresentation of the policy that they are leaning on. The policy was made in the 70s that the law that they should get the best consideration reasonably obtained. This is the wording. But that comes from an entirely different period where reasonable in the 70s is different to what reasonable is now 50 years later in this case. And what it leads to is people getting the maximum price. It's a

total misreading at the cost of anything else that might happen in that city. the cost of local people being able to rent houses, the university themselves being able to attract the best staff because they can't come to the city because they can't afford the rent. These kind of responsibilities aren't seen on the whole as being rippled out from these kinds of decisions. These decisions are happening all the time. And so leaning back on these this old legislation, actually the original parts of it was 1940s. it hasn't really been updated fully um since those original conceptions where the first planning policies came in.

So that's a kind of these are opening conditions for some of the things that I'll say. Um the the third one that I want to pay attention to and I'll reflect on all three of them at the end of this is that the values that can be written then into plans and other kinds of conditioning structures 10 20 30 50 years before have the real opportunity for creating the conditions for development. That's where you need to be paying attention. In my view it's very difficult to pay attention to that stage. It's very hard to see what's currently happening if there's deals on pieces of land happening that you you're not privy to but that are setting the expectation that people are financing

these deals and then you find out 10 20 years later at the moment at which it's very difficult to affect and in the UK there is the side of the developer is defended in them being able to get the amount that um is expected from this from these sites. Um there's new legislation coming out to try and make this a little bit more reasonable, but on the whole um the ability to to convert these kinds of decisions into capital now is defended pretty well in in the legislation in order to get homes built without any kind of characteristic of what kind of homes. But in the UK, it's about just the volume of homes with a very

old-fashioned view on how supply and demand works, which I would say the supply and demand element is very relevant, but it really takes some local categorization. And an example of managing to to try and lock this into rules that might have an effect in 10 or 20 years time was some policy work I was doing um with a much larger structure, the Salts Cross Garden Village. It was 2,200 homes and we were doing some work on a community land trust owning the entire site. And so then that starts to create the point at which you can come and ask for this 10 years later because it sat in policy. It

was there as a planning policy for the whole site. And so we illustrated how it might work, how it might be passed through different structures, how co-ousing might be enabled on it, uh energy companies, food supply. This then starts to illustrate a much larger scale of thinking and mapping was a big part of this. um understanding who owned which farms from before, where they were sold to, seeing the involvement of Oxford colleges, again, even on small pieces of land, and what that does to what's possible up here on the front of the road, um is a meaningful part of the analysis on how you say a trust would end up being able to own this because all of these people's expectations from

in some cases hundreds of years before are meaningful in making sure you can get a livable uh clusters of neighborhoods that interact and relate to each other. Am I keeping everyone? Yeah. Okay. So, those are my opening conditions [laughter] and I'll refer to them afterwards. But these three parts I'll try and relate to at the end as well. The the way that I'll talk about this first is is with the England example, the whole national level. That's not meant to just say England first. Um that's an unfortunate bit of language.

Um but where collaborative housing's patterns have emerged over the last uh 60 or 70 years and each the point I'll make over and over again is that the local enabling conditions the things that have happened in that place are a precursor to what's possible. That's my ongoing part of this thesis that you'll become marketized as you develop this that that happens because we're making the material. But the local place sets what's possible. There's some places that are much more possible to do things than others. And that's not a reason not to do it. It's just a recognition of what's required to do it in certain places.

And and then I would say a hint at can we change those conditions in order to be able to make a fertile ground for being able to do things. A lot of groups that I'll show work uphill, really try and force something in an area that's that's not ready to take it and and often cases they they don't succeed. Um in some cases they work really hard to change something and it takes 20 years. It's really difficult in certain places. It's just to be recognized, I would say. And in terms of the national landscape for collaborative housing groups, the area that I look into in my work, um there's also clear north south divides uh in terms of the identity that these

groups of people choose when they're delivering housing together outside of state or private structures, sometimes with private structures, but there's a community group uh leading the process or shaping the process. And in the north because of largecale cooperatives in Rochdale the origins of the cooperative movement sit there uh there's a familiarity with cooperatives that means that they're more likely to call themselves co-ops in the south of England post 2010. This is this data. Um they're more likely to use the land trusts as a structure because they're dealing with with land and its effect on affordable housing and other things. Um there's particularly a lot of organizations setting up in London

still. Uh the darker green speaks to um the incidents of of in rural areas. Um and some of the pattern here is really that where there's groups of people that are retired uh they tend to be spending more time in these spaces developing it forward. So retirees have an like there's some relationship there uh as an early indication just because there's people there who have time and are disagreeing with how it is and have some experience and confidence to be able to lead into this.

Um it's just a very uh loose relationship. So it's not something I've put on here. This is just incidents linked to identity. Um and in that most of the the the housing stock is urban of all of these data sets because the very large cooperatives of the 20th century took on huge amounts of land. So most of England's collaborative housing is urban cooperatives taking on very large pieces uh very large blocks very large pieces of land mostly from the state before and transferring them across in the 70s 80s and uh a structure called tenant management organizations in the 90s.

I'll explain that a little bit more in in a moment. Um but with after 2010 and 2010 is a meaningful moment because that's when England gets a a national body for community land trusts um you start to see rural land ownership within these trusts rise and so it sort of takes over the data a little bit. There's a whole host of other things that happened in 2010 post global financial crash and a focus on localism uh in England with policies that were backing local action but without much ability to build out of it. So you see lots of groups trying to do something and there's money arriving to to form a group of people to do something but not enough to follow them

up with the money to actually build homes. And so I found that around one in five organizations in both urban and rural have built a single home. there's quite a lot of people doing things without really the potential to build anything. And so you see that through here that um in organization terms it's just over half is urban um post 2010 the kind of recent ones and then uh in terms of the amount of homes rural but it's a very small pool of of houses that are being built and as I talk through this this is really trying to tell the story of how

since 1975 which is where my data set goes back to. Um the identity of different organization types is they're trying to achieve the same thing but they replace each other in culture and policy of the time. So where large housing cooperatives started to get some attention from the early 60s in the UK there were experiments and prototypes for 200 years before that as well. But when it started when it started to come out of the post-war period um there was an attention to cooperatives as a way of dealing with this particularly through a set of labor governments that um I don't know if you in the UK we tend to flip between labor and conservative governments with some distant some

differences every now and then. So you see a Labor government come in, they create a set of policies for this housing sector. Then Labor will come in, repeal everything, change the D direction. And in this case, it was housing cooperatives got a big focus as rent caps were being removed from after the war. Um so we had big red rent regulation in World War I and World War II um just because of the quality of the homes and the conditions that people were living in.

So housing cooperatives across that period start to go down and then you management organizations start to come up in the 90s and then across all of this you've got self-help housing that I've got in blue running along the bottom. So little dribbles of people building together under this identity. And in recent times, you've got a wave of community land trusts. And because my data in this period ran to the end of 2016, this was a decade ago that I was doing this work. Um, you see these three clear waves in terms of organization formation.

And just for you, this wasn't uh in the eventual research because it was so tentative, but I've put a house price index over the top of this. So, you've got times where house prices are starting to rise at the same time as you've got the incidence of these organizations dropping. And then after there's a point at which house prices get to a certain point, you've got a few years lag and then a rise in these kinds of organizations. So, there's some reflection between these kinds of entities. One of these points is that for the early 2000s when um property prices were going up and up, there was a lot of exuberance across English cities, you've got very little organization formation at this point. And then as you come into 2007, 8 n 10, you've got a

wave starting to arrive again. Um, I say this is tentative because the data is just not there's not detailed enough data on this, but it sits there as an interesting kind of provocation that maybe we could talk about. So, I've just mentioned this formation dip. Um, and in this in this data that sits behind this, this is social rented housing, public housing, uh, is starting to decline. From the '9s, the idea of affordable housing is going from people's needs to what is a position from market housing. So it might be uh 60 70 80% um of market housing. So a 20 30 40% discount. Um it

gets related in the 90s to the market, not to what people need. And that's that's defended by a judge in 1993. So there's this there's these clear points where it changes. And when people are delivering this kind of housing, they set up the organization, but it there's so much restriction in doing this kind of of development uh that it takes a long time. And what I looked into in my work was um what founding motivations were there for the reason to chase this, what events and key practices were occurring that happen over many decades.

And in the four cities that I look at, I then look at four roughly four in each of these cities. Uh going back as organizations to 1977 as one of them. And the solid bit is when they were developing and then the existence afterwards. And some of these uh didn't carry forwards. Uh entities like Dick CLT which I'll show you um on case study pages. So these are the ones I looked at. There are four cities that represent um high incidences of of collaborative housing activity, people forming organizations, people building homes, uh and lows on a matrix and then affordable housing in that area. So an

affordability entity, affordability notion that comes through house prices and rents. So I was saying there's places where there seems to be lots of activity and how does that map over affordability of the houses as a blended rate sort of roughly selecting cities from this basis and then I se then did further selection of these based on ability to find some characteristics that I won't go into and what I said before around the enabling conditions come from place um what when I was looking at what had come before in the previous decades in each of these places, it constituted a large part of what was possible um and it constitutes

not only often we give a lot of attention to the individuals who run these kinds of projects or the teams that sit behind these projects. What I found was that it was not related at all. Um as I started to interview these people, it wasn't about their abilities, skills, capitalization, the local networks. It was a lot about what what had been possible in the past. What had they managed in this city to do something before? Um, and it's a local uh kind of condition of this place that's hard to pin down and is worth further work, but I've got some opening thoughts on it.

And for the people that are interested in the theory that sat behind, I've just got a few slides on this, but um I was looking at how groups assemble um as a kind of live and dynamic grouping of components. So I was looking at finance, land, the groups, their motivations, practices that happen. All of this gets pulled in under the analysis and then doesn't stop moving under this. It's not a snapshot in time. And in in certain cases, a group that got financed under public funding in the 70s, the group that I mentioned, their loan got sold under them in the 90s with an exit period that was 60 years beyond that and hard to get out of, which changed their ability to make bids on new sites and do

new things. So, this is constantly moving. Even though housing feels like something that you manage to achieve, you build the homes, people move in, everything keeps moving constantly. And when I was looking at each of these places, it what you see is that people go from a position of um steadiness. We're calling here a stratum. This like that humans in in groups move towards this position um as an as a constant state, but that they're pulled back towards this line on the left, which is chaos. The chaos part here isn't something to be flowed over into, but it's a very productive place as you're moving towards it. And you're starting

to decode the local rules. You starting to question what's possible in these places. And so this eb and flow of and I'll illustrate this with groups, but this eb and flow of uh starting to propose something potentially a communities under attack of some kind like of demolition in certain cases. It drives them to form groups to set their boundaries and then to move towards planning and curation in a state where things are moving quite rapidly but then they move back towards a a state of stasis and they want to be there as a kind of movement. Um and I charted that through diagrams through this work over the years.

Um and so it's like very simplistic in this but like this this rough uh forming this assemblage in this area that's the last of the theory the op and I can talk more about that but I really didn't want to make it about this this presentation this becomes a opening part this type of housing is marginal within the English housing delivery this is a small proportion something like 1% in terms of stock in terms of the amount of homes that are built. Um, and the sector that represents this, the co-ops, the community land trusts, the co-housing groups are asking this question, how can we be less marginal? But my position on

this is that they keep themselves marginal. They're on the edges. This is the part of talking about this as boundaries. They're constantly relating to a s some kind of systemic shift that they're looking to inspire, but they're relating to a condition and they continue to shift. And that's what those diagrams were showing. They're always seeking to address something at a time. 100 years ago, that was housing conditions. There was lots of slums in in in the center of English cities. Um, and they're looking from a public health position. the first time that people have been driven to the cities and it came quick in the end got faster that people were driven to the cities but it was the first time that provision became a key part of this that suddenly people looked were looking after themselves and

each other out in the countryside and linked through to towns in the village scale but when they were driven to cities most of that was under an industrial route that was having then connections to mills and and other structures um that meant for the first time they had needed a structure like the state to to support in a in a big way. And then you get the first incidences of national planning policies in 1907 to try and adjust this. Um things like the garden cities movement from the end of the uh so from 1897 onwards. All of this starts to get into 20 or 30 years of trying to understand how public health can come at the center of these cities from the first indication of provision.

And I'm saying that they as a reaction to that to try and create self-provision um after the after World War II um they keep the argument moving based on what's necessary and the current real focus on the argument since the 2010 was affordable housing but prior to that had been housing conditions and tenure rights and each of these battles get in some way gained and they they reframe and refocus. Um so so my provocation here is that they keep themselves marginal and that's useful. That divergence, that position is something to lean into.

And as they manage to prove themselves, as they manage to create a policy, as they manage to finish some homes, uh this starts to lock in the ability for other people to do something as well. It creates a um this condition that I've talked about. You've managed to prove that it's possible with some small thing. someone can build on that and it doesn't have to be in that city. It can be in another city that manages to visit the thing that you've gone that that they've done. But when you're bringing it down to your city or your town or your village, you're assembling it with completely different parts. And so, uh, it's it's going to be different. It's going to be made of different material, even if you're inspired by them. That might be obvious, but I think when

people are looking at model housing, they're looking at other places that have done it, they seek to replicate. uh they see to look at a model, they're looking for models the whole time. Um but actually that translation process creates something entirely new based on the possibilities of that place. Always about the the kind of enabling conditions of a place. I put in here some recommendations from this work to try and make it less about cases and and more about um what we can do with this. what might be positive through this work. Um, and heat gets attracted to um, issues that

um, get risen up in the kind of public voice and things that may be really valuable to understand may just not have the same heat as other things. Um, and where you start to lock that into legal structures, policies, you start to be able to create those conditions yourself. So, I'll keep repeating myself in in these and particularly the the third example I showed at the beginning of this like large scale policy um application of 2,200 homes. Um, I think getting these recognized within existing large scale schemes and representing isn't the exciting level that most of these types of entities, cooperatives and cohousing

groups want to be at, but it's the stage that will actually allow this to thrive in those places later. And so councils have a lot of the strategic planning uh going on actively now that the people that would benefit from it later are very rarely at the table managing to fight for it. Um there's this proxy generation of people who believe something's impossible in the future and turn up to the council meetings and uh propose something fight against something that they won't benefit from. Um there's these there's this disconnect um because the people that might move into these homes um may still be children at that point. It's a very long long range when it comes to

housing policy and any kind of finance or policy direction from governments and others takes 15 or 20 years to to come into action. It's infrastructure. This is like railways and roads and but it's not treated like that by governments and often they flip the housing one every few years between each other and it leaves us in a state where we don't really manage to uh to hold that long term at the level that it's needed. uh hubs are were a big part of this in England. So where um there was large amounts of funding in 2017 for this kind of housing, uh they mostly focused it on building a group, building an

organization group, but not on actually building the homes as I've shown before. But they then later reinforced sets of regional hubs that could create a consistency across these kinds of groups, could share knowledge, could build funds, um that could outside of the cycles, the political cycles, but also the group cycles, um connect things up and some of those got really well funded and that skewed things as well. So if you fund into one of these hub entities in a strong way, it creates a a very strong enabling condition.

Um and people's attitudes came into the work. So there was some middle class housing co-housing in in the recent years that was very similar to groups of people that were doing this in lower income communities. what they were proposing was was comparable, but because it was going from middle- class group versus a lower income group, the way that they were seen by local professionals, by their council bodies was completely different. Like this group of people can do it. This white middle class often group of people, but others don't have the resources, don't have the backgrounds. and they couldn't really explain as to why this was, but this occurred with with conversations with councils in all four of these cities is that there's some people that

get to do this and some people that don't. And you also found that when I was looking at hubs as well, some people that wanted to be up at the table who were working in local city areas um and were fighting for completely different things that their community was going to be pulled aside by a new rail system um and so they had to come up with something. We're trying to participate but we're finding a struggle to participate on even grounds. There's some expectations there. And when they build I'll show you these images now. So that was the case with with Lilac. They finished in 2014 with a a model that was based on um paying a percentage of your lo of local incomes.

And then so every year you pay 35% of your income into a pot that's managed. and uh people who pay off their pot then then pay a smaller amount on an ongoing basis. 10% was the original equity fund. So there there's a group of people who are buying a old school site contaminated and building um nice homes with good local provisions and grow food growing and other things. Um being framed by council officers that they are the right kind of groups that are able to do this. But then groups like Newertly who I who were my I was most interested in as I went through this research who were using a whole set of strategies to get themselves politically relevant uh to

fight off developers that were coming and paying attention to them locally. Um one of these examples was that the council had tried to demolish their entire neighborhood and they'd done it once before. So this was the second time that they'd come under attack. The first was in the 60s and they framed it as this kind of attacking function that made them really know who was in their neighborhood and who was in the next neighborhood. They define their boundaries very cleanly. Um the council was telling it wasn't safe because the gasometer in the local area, the local gas works made that it wasn't um on an ongoing basis possible for people to live there. They then used the same kind of narratives to fight the dem demolition coming forwards as they tried to propose new housing there. So they

pulled out contradictions, they made them political. Um and they in the words of this work rendered these points technical. They made a technicality um where others were trying to create narratives that undercut them. So they end up as a group and this was in different cities as well, but I think this was the clearest. they end up using the tools against that are used against them against the kind of the threat as they go towards that chaos position that I mentioned like they're coming up and they're being pushed forwards out of their lives to having to suddenly organize for being able to stay with their friends and families and others and as they were interviewed as they went around local places the people that

they interviewed initially said well this place in the words of the person is a tip like this place is full of rubbish this is full of violence like we want it to be And as they started to talk about it, they realized that if they were going to have to leave this place, they would be far away from their friends, their family, and actually internal development was better. And so it put them on a course of understanding that they could do something about this and that they would have no power in the development if they just simply allowed demolition to happen. And the like one of the first actions was building a community hub in the local area, community center, which had a a very strong um revenue by the end.

So they had a revenue flow that allowed them to then pay for their own planning processes, uh housing development. Um they were running local clinic services and education programs. This was the one of their first steps. Um I'll have to go back uh later. you'll see something else that they did, but they they created really impressive policies. They then 10 years later al were in a position to allocate sites. So this took 20 years to get to this point of building their own housing, but it was built on top of all of the steps before. They weren't a housing group. They were just building capacities in order to relate to the fact that they were going to be moved aside.

So they're choosing between these sites, one of which was the gas works, and there's a big gasometer. So, they've been using this as a a way of talking about this this type of housing. Um, and then the same comes from some bigger neighborhoods across the 70s and 80s who uh were allowed to take on their ownership as a neighborhood when the policy was in a position that uh community anchors, community uh gateway organizations, these structures were called, allowed an entire community to be taken over and start to rebuild and build centers. And this was at a time where council budgets were running out.

This was the end of the 80s really um sort of like post Thatcher years um where new models were being put forwards because the council budgets were running dry. They and the conditions of these houses that were built 50 60 years before um it w wasn't possible to use council budgets to to renovate them to make them livable. So they had to look for different structures and community structures started to come forwards. Um and again on the conditions the neighborhoods that managed to do this then were in a position to do new housing. So in the case of WY Birch they 20 30 years later had a position that they could develop housing because of all the work that had gone in building community resources before. It

comes out of a of an asset base. It comes out of experience comes through people being at this local level having been uh trained in running local communities. Um, so it gives us I think this gives us a story for how we develop going forwards at the scale we develop as well. And Nichel's and Aston further north. This was a group of people that already were coming under a threat from a new highspeed rail that was running through the the center of their neighborhood and also wanted to use the same tools but want to do them without any kind of background of community assets in that area. Um and so they were trying to make what they could with their neighboring

um neighborhoods like Perry Common to be able to use the same tools and tricks and resources, but they're at the beginning of that journey despite being under threat of demolition from this train. So you see them doing this kind of action and trying to participate. Um and still in Birmingham, I'm not really focusing on the places as I go through these. isn't trying to just tell this the kind of illustrating stories, but there's places that this wasn't possible. So, same train line up on the left that then later affects groups of people 30 years 20 years later um that I just mentioned trying to develop sites in this area and it not being possible by a whole host of

conditions that weren't ready yet that may have been ready later and they spent 101 15 years on this um without managing to come forwards to buy the land and and resource it. It's still pretty much sat like that at the moment. So I kind of put these down as where you manage to get through in a set of gates that will come forwards at you. So there's some enabling conditions and there's some steps to go through. So the reluctance of doing something new is always there but it's worth relativizing within what's possible in other places.

Um reports were a big part of this. Getting a professional to repi write a report put a stamp on it. uh in order to authorize that knowledge as big as a big part of what was possible 10 20 years after. So you see these reports come up and the same kind of people floating around where they've managed to get something in a in a planning policy process that someone else uses 20 years later. The the kind of what I'm trying to put across in this is it's really important to get involved in these enabling condition formations. So in this local area, it's not solely about taking on sites and buying properties.

It's also about contributing to the local policy formation, the financial resource formation to set the enabling conditions that would have made it easier for you to do what you're doing that you're finding difficult now. And we did a a piece of work in Berlin uh looking at five very large co-ops on this basis. um 120 million of development value, all independently developing, all struggling to collaborate because they were starting to cast each other as different to themselves. Even though they were part of trying to develop something that was consistently looked the same, they're the groups that are looking for looking to work with the councils. Uh they're the ones looking working with the wrong finance people. They're the ones that are slightly going alternative and

different um not managing to get a kind of coalition together that could develop what they needed. So all of them independently are trying to raise 10 million here and 50 million there and not linking up with staff. So this is definitely a slight aside but this comes through this how do we create these conditions for cooperative entities to cooperate because they don't do it naturally. It's really difficult because we're making of the material of what's currently here. When you walk out on the streets very difficult to see cooperation modeled across our lives.

And so this is not a negative thing. I think there's tons of positivity and hope in this, but there's some reality to this position that um we have these kinds of organizations with the ability to to work together and uh it's difficult. Maybe that's these things maybe are obvious, but I mean they they sit there here in some of these cases that we've been doing the last years. Um and then latching things on to local policy. um like groups nearby doing things on blue zones within the Alps of longevity and like these kind of things come up and then can be linked to to to talk of the issue of the times. Um

um mirroring language business languages came out of this work uh finance and others. there has to be some kind of um um mimicking in order to get some get the translation across and um that takes time to get to. But when they start to use the same kind of structures, in this case asset locks, this is uh locking a piece of land so that it can't be used for anything but the particular purpose. Um covenants on these pieces of land before you own it. using these these structures and this applies all across Europe allows you to be able to translate this into the kinds of aims that people are looking to do and when you manage to get one scheme it makes more um but I conversely found in

the large scale data set that there was a very weak relationship between these two things in the data that there's a kind of there is a condition there that says I'll leave it there. I've got some slides on this if people are interested in the stats part. Um, a key practice was around massaging the mess. Many of these groups uh struggle to make coherent arguments that are translatable. So, you then start to see professionals coming in trying to make it translatable. Um, this is just seems to be there. Um move through these ones. Uh it changes a

lot when people are in homes for the organization themsel. So if you want to do more homes, you want to keep being a provider of homes as a trust. Um managing to get your first ones way more important than the first one being the perfect ideal version of what you want to do. This track record as quickly as possible manages to give you the platform to to do the next thing. Um, and in England at least, um, market prices is something that's very worth pushing back against because, as I said before, policy does reinforce land owners market prices. Um, I think it's something that really affects the ability to do things. Next, I'm going to slide through some of these

examples. This is an interesting one. Um, this was the group that in the 60s set up with public funding. They built um I think not 23 homes for definite. Um it was something like 60 homes as well um in this scheme and because of the kind of finance they took on as I mentioned earlier their loan was set was sold to Nat West Bank later in the 90s which restricted them when it came to the early 2000s and wanting to bid on this site which was earmarked for community housing um as part of a wider scheme because in the previous years it had been made in reports and other kinds of structures that came before this uh

enforced to be a community housing site. So this wasn't like a one-off political decision. It came through lots of different things. I also found the politicians that made the decision to allocate this site had been traveling around Europe looking at similar things 10 years before. So you find them in these study tours going to see these places and then being in a position where they can recommend it because they have a personal connection to it. But the co-op, which should have been in really good position, the one from the 60s, they should have been well resourced. They had all the track record, were locked out of being able to bid on this site, um, for two reasons.

They couldn't get sufficient finance because they had this existing loan that was holding them down. And the second was they couldn't compete with the modern co-housing groups of which they were made of people who had benefited from policies across the end of the 20th century to increase house prices. and so had a a free house out of policy roughly because of how house prices really exceeded local wages growth across this period. So this local co-op which is an affordable co-op uh couldn't compete on the same terms because they were competing with people who had bought houses and were using that collective buying power. And so you see the previous waves of experienced um organizations who have the right

networks and links just not being able to go up against the purchasing power of modern co-ops that are assembling capital that was that was coming from private wealth and you end up this is where I wanted to say that this kind of these decisions make a difference but laterally this scheme which is a cohazing scheme uh it gives great things for these lo for these people. Um eventually couldn't couldn't deliver the affordable housing that was in the policy. And so even though they're one of this collaborative housing kind of network, um later they take the affordable houses out because they can't manage to find someone who

can pay enough for the affordable house. So they end up putting them back into market homes. These conditions across time make a difference. these like there's a ton of decisions that comes to that point that they can't do affordable housing in a scheme like this and a whole other sets the the actual quality the build quality shared resources um they all add up to this um I've covered some of these already uh in Bristol at least social value was held forward so they were valuing um what it is that outside of monetary terms and they were using new legislation to be able to make deals on sites for a pound or for free. So very

lowcost sites. They were working with the local government to make the policies where they were valuing things in different terms. And that is another thing that creates conditions. So not just policy, not other forms of finance, but being able to see value in different terms. And the officers that I spoke to in the city council for this were really behind this form. they could understand it because they were using a government approved methodology that had also come from sets of people trying to create different value structures. So using these um was a big part of what made it possible in Bristol.

I'm going to keep moving. I can share these slides afterwards, but there's a lot that I've put into here so far and I want to get to the to the conversation part. Um climate innovation district in Leeds. This was a largecale multi-phase scheme starting over here at phase one. And this was an example of a group that were quite well financed, had a hub that had had a lot of resources um being part of a developer scheme where the developer owns the land and managing to get to a point where because of their involvement, the developer put the entire sets of phases into a community trust. So the it's a bit like that the the opening version I made of this very large scale policy for 2,00 homes. This

was done through a developer who could see the benefit of not leaving a community that they were working with impoverished for later. Often developers get out as quickly as possible because it's very expensive to do housing development. Um but then when they leave they don't leave a kind of they don't leave assets at a local level that can be used to keep developing things. Um, and those things might be local shops, local food production, um, energy. In this case, they were put building a local energy company.

And all of this was going into this community trust to build community assets. Um, so developers can be a route to doing this as well. And it's a sort of slick modern scheme in the center of a city, but it also has this underlying uh trust underneath it where restaurants, shops, cafes are the leases underneath them are owned by this trust. I will move through this Chapel Town one. This is the the front cover of that community plan from 2009 that sets up the case for this local neighborhood to do the development and to to push up against demolition in their area.

Um, and in terms of prototyping, getting something done on the ground being really important. This was a group that didn't ask the permission to build a small self-built home on wheels as their first act to get something in. And then they opened it as a neighborhood owned Airbnbs where all the resources from the Airbnb was going into a pot that they own. And the first night the mayor of the city in Bristol slept in the Airbnb and endorsed it. And in the opening part said, "We're going to build a factory to build these. Uh it's going to be in this neighborhood and we're going to put in an order from the city for the first 20." So they played the game of getting something in quickly and then getting a political endorsement and then turning that into a financial kind

of pact that leads them to be able to do more. And this is a a lowincome neighborhood in Bristol. And the person there speaking is the CEO of um of a media center who are doing media programs with local people. So it's run from an entirely different place from arts and production recording studios. This was the origin of these ideas to give enough capacity at the local level. Or this one which was an old builder's yard became quite a famous example of a self-build scheme um where no one else could build on it. It was an old contaminated piece of land and they made it work over time um by pushing for this to be done differently to create the

policy connections again. Um so it had to be a community housing site in the end. it had to be sold for that basis. And so they did all that action in order to set the table for them to be able to move in and then built it over time and they're now really nice houses, but they forgot to put a trust underneath it. So the houses became very valuable uh on their own. an example that keeps being learned across Europe um of forgetting the underlying land appreciation part sometime always makes it inaccessible later to do it if you don't manage to deal with these two things.

Um these are my kind of closing parts on on the four cities. So enabling conditions are really important here and the what you manage to write into policy and and finance documents, reporting documents is worth putting loads of energy into even though it may seem intangible um prior to the scheme. Um you're becoming marketized. This would this would be my this was the piece that comes through my work. All of these groups in current times are taking on parts of market practices in order to survive. Managing to to produce anything. And understanding what has been marketized out of what you've done

allows you to decide what is it that you want to pay attention to and kind of keep out of the forces of markets. That's a definitely one for discussion rather than a a clean assertion. But what I found was these parts of of of markets exhibiting and it was hard for me to then go back to these groups who were trying to build affordable housing or um kind of lowcarbon housing and say that they'd become found components of them being marketized because it really wasn't in their framing to see that. Um but when you go through it by the end of the scheme so many compromises had been made over five years 10 years 20 years that um this became a key part of it.

nothing nothing exists outside of of our collective society in the framing of this. Um and these are the last three slides. This then links to uh projects that we're doing at the moment um from here in Europe, but working with a a group called the South African Development Action Group, a longer standing group working in South Africa um and a and a long-term partner of mine, the International Center for Community Land Trust based in Vermont who um are doing a piece of work in informal settlements in Cape Town to understand how to bring in the community land trust as a as a legal structure

within South Africa where they have Dutch Roman law instead of common law and um to see whether you can create the community trust as an intermediary that represents the informal settlement without revealing the identities um of people to the state but creating a a trusted entity that can operate on behalf of people. Um and this sets out the first parts of a brief that we'll look into through um an Ethereum fellowship across the next year. Um in this case the informal settlements are there but um where this has happened in the past particularly in um Puerto

Rico 20 years ago a policy was made to to register land tenures across a community of around 5,000 um homes. C building a centralized registry of this over the last 20 years has got something like 450 of the homes registered. Uh people are reluctant for for good reason to register their homes um because of their experience of how um formal structures have treated them as they move towards securing their own tenure. But they have the same aspirations. They want clean water, they want electrics running in, they want kind of safe streets, but not at the risk of potentially being moved away.

And they've seen and seen this in in cities all around the world that a modernist view of doing development is to is to sweep everybody away, move different people in. We did this in Europe, all across Europe 100 years ago in order to be able to develop through land increasing land prices in Birmingham, one of my cities. Uh that happens directly. uh the the to be prime minister, the Chamberlain brothers were in in Bristol in Birmingham and they recognized that um private house builders would never develop the houses that people actually needed. They had enough experience of private house builders not releasing homes of the right type. They were releasing them

within their own business model. So you had politicians who were recognizing that in council meetings and then making decisions to allocate parts of the city that could be for the existing middle classes in the city to move into and then moving people in lower income neighborhoods in the center into those areas of housing that the middle classes were leaving and then cleaning up the slums. was a tactic that was used all across Europe um in progressive ways and non-progressive ways um now I would say there's other opportunities that we can learn from um that allow us to network these groups of people um in ways that

allow us to develop the case for for improving these areas um from within from from the power structure of the people that live there already rather than what we used to do 100 years ago and we're still doing that. We're still taking the easy route from the perspective of where capital and state lies. Um so working with this group we're addressing the same kind of things like who gets to write that record um and and how do they manage to coordinate in order to develop uh kind of the resources that we want in our neighborhoods.

And those three questions around um like what is that boundary? how does it relate to the boundaries next to it creates an opportunity I think for relational registries that are a little bit more dispersed. Um so be looking at how that works with um entities that have already been doing this cadaster and others. And um I'll leave you with this one which is these if there's anything you want to take from this it's around creating the conditions.

I I think there's people here that really know this, but from what I've looked to into all of these schemes. Um, it really isn't about the the resources, the skills, the experience of people working. It's about the place in which they're trying to assemble it locally. So, I would say like create the fertile grounds, create those soils that are possible for this stuff to be be able to to happen. Um, it's not to say don't do it in the places that it's hard. is just address those enabling conditions and I'll leave it there. Happy to take questions.

[applause] Thank you very much. It's u I don't know where to start with this. I have many questions. Maybe main one uh related to how do you see I'm curious to see your opinion on this. How do you see all these long-term plans uh multi-entury plans on um yeah what the land will be used for and

what are the values to be respected and how do you see all these sudden innovation the last century and especially the last few decades and um the ability to play with the rules And with the um yeah to play the yeah play the rule bit um take advantage of the situation and financial games, political games, the possibility to trick a bit the the situation and have a a new thing that were not planned

before. Um, how do you see these long-term rules or long-term goals being respected or do they make sense actually in the long term? uh seen also the last decade we had a lot of different um directions let's say from going to the city suddenly people going to the rural uh the long-term infrastructure goals but how do you see all this coming and what does make sense now and the future >> um just to point to the the first point

around very long-term horizons. I think it's a it's a useful kind of navigating structure for being able to think about what decades and hundreds of years and to the kind of thousand years. Um in reality things move constantly. So these things then become shifted and adjusted but it's a it's a good measure to get outside of our human lives. And if you come back to say mortgages being valued against 25 years 30 years of working life yet none of these based on working lives these kinds of schemes they're in the years or perpetual this starts to again by using these kinds of framings starts to be mirrored into

policies into ways of doing finance that reflect the reality that these things are perpetual that they are moving constantly um so I think they're useful I would say and they come into I've seen enough very long-term plans and then seen them change rapidly by a new political direction. Uh and huge amounts of resources done without connecting these plans across particularly local authorities. localities holds to do a a lowcarbon plan by 2030 and then many many city council officers go out react to that impetus develop the same plans over the same time period which then get wiped out by the next incoming sets of

politicians who are now setting the bar at 2040 or in this case maybe 2100. So these things end up becoming relative but useful. Um not a very success satisfactory answer. The the the second second question about the the practices the tactics that are taken um in in the bits that came before my PhD those those three cases that I gave around land ownership the the scheme that we tried to buy as a consortium. Um and then the largecale site of 2,000 homes. Um what I was reflecting on afterwards as we lost that was actually

playing fair in this against an uneven playing field where the rules of the game weren't to play fair in this. It weren't to follow the policies, weren't to try and build the quotas of housing that were there. Uh sets it against you and you're going to lose if you if you do that. You've got to either set the terrain beforehand so that you can create the conditions to win or you you play the same rules as others for a different value um kind of set. Now the difficult thing with that is that many of these trusts cooperatives are dealing with a neighborhood and a kind of wider public where the integrity that sits in the way that they speak about forward development is really

important. So to play dirty this to to try and play the rules of the system in order to win on the benefit of these long-term communities can also undermine you in this case if if you're also found to not be playing with integrity. So it's a boundary that you end up having to hold very very carefully. Um I would say it's worth engaging with. I I think that these kinds of uh groups of people should be playing the same playing field as everybody else, which is why I said we're all working with the same sets of material.

It's the same money that we can borrow. The the these kinds of groups have the same ability to borrow as a private developer building housing as well in the same conditions. Uh sometimes cheaper. Um, but the policy and the the laws just aren't set for them to succeed in the thing they're trying to work at. So I I have an undeveloped part of this which is I think invisibly people should be playing dirty. Should be playing for the value set that they want to enable in the future. I just don't know how you do that without losing your own integrity because then it erodess into what you're doing. Um, I think Joanna Macy spoke to this in terms of like being able to change society is a kind of violent act that comes in and affects us and so

raising up consciousness at the same time is part of that model of like understanding the violence that the act of trying to change happens. I think this is part of these types of cycles that we have to try and we have we have to shift the bar on what's possible in our cities. in doing so enacts a fairly um it's a strong movement that has an effect on ourselves as we do it. This is definitely the kind of thing that's worth having a conversation rather than kind of like a onetoone answer because there's so much unsaid there.

>> There was a lot of juice in the conversation. I mean in the presentation there's a lot to digest but maybe I missed this if it was said or not but I'm wondering like one of the things that we have been exploring for the project here is um uh ownership model like the meat house syndic uh from Germany and they have a Austrian version called habitat and I wonder if the [snorts] cooperative housing that you're talking about in all of these these case studies. Do you have something like this in England as well?

And do you know more about how the meat house tend model works? >> Yeah. Um and also Claraara spoke about it yesterday a little bit. So there could be ways we fill this in. Um yeah, we have old versions of this in in England um that ended up owning large amounts of homes. Um so there's different structures that went into cooperatives. Some of the biggest ones own 14,000 homes but just wouldn't be seen in the same light as the meat hoses syndicart. Um there's also recognizable ones like Radical Roots which are doing something very similar but not as successful in terms of the amount of cooperative homes that they're managing to do but they have their own um what's called roottock. they have their own ability to

to issue um like uh it's not stock it's it's it's debt against their organizations in a similar way to the how the meatizer syndicart does it between their um local game bias the the structures and the taking shares within the wider network so this is kind of like relationship between the individual and then the power of building it and borrowing money across the wider um and there's also the same in Switzerland going on um for a group that uh we've been supporting recently. Uh it's very promising like especially the German mito syndic progress. I mean where I live in Kyborg is the origins of some of that movement and the people still live there.

Um this network capacity I've found is has been hard to sustain in the modern movements >> and it's interesting to look at a little bit. It's like time time definitely does give a lot. Managing to get 20 or 30 years in uh creates a a playing field that you're able to have a lot more choices. The the field of opportunities is much greater. Um so time helps and like being patient about that coming forwards. Um what I've noticed for this for this kind of like the sector that I've come into these kinds of spaces from like being getting involved in OASA four years ago, five years ago um and trying to project a story of of network

capacities at the same time as others are projecting a story of network capacities but not managing to mingle those those edges between them >> and then trying to say well there's a whole host of resources here that could be used for free as Sam and Luna will have spoken about a few days ago. But then inviting people in with and trying to act on their own story within that with their own autonomy, their own ability to create local economics, but joining a network, joining another force rather than setting up another network. That seems very diff that seems like a thing that keeps h happening. seems very difficult to counter in a way that um the culture and contexts of the the latter 20th century seemed to create the

conditions that um some of these network capacities over time were possible. Um in the 80s and 90s in England there was a big movement for uh credit unions at the same time and what we saw was that they big ones just swallowed the other ones and they got bigger and bigger and they got to a point where they were unrecognizable as credit unions most of them and the same happened to the housing association sector where we've got very large uh third sector organizations building housing because they've gobbled each other up. They're not doing this kind of flat dispersed network capacity. they're eating each other in order to become bigger and bigger and in that way end up perpetuating this same marketization

structure. They become managerial. They're subject to standards that kind of really force what they can do. And for the case of affordable housing and housing associations, they end up not being able to borrow for anything other than the market related housing. And so they become blurred over time. Um, so that's another kind of I I don't know what's necessary for now to make cooperative like true cooperation possible. Like the only way I can think of it is like give like giving it out. Not just saying we want to cooperate but like really allowing someone to come in and be a cooperative partner which is also

not like there was not strong enough. One way of thinking about this in Oxford was I tried to create a a local pension scheme for all the cooperatives and I and we at the time we're an architecture practice. We were had been storing up a reserves policy that we had £100,000 in our bank account. We were saying to the rest of the cooperative sector, do you have this? We're we're doing this for our own financial sustainability, but we could put this into local structures in order to make a pension that is using the same tools as directors of companies are using. We can buy our own offices.

We can buy shopfronts. We can rent them back to ourselves. This is all possible if we're thinking at this scale. But I said I need two other organizations to do it. And really what in hindsight what I should have done is just put the first 100,000 in a big risk because I needed some backing. But I think you've got to lead with a strong action of cooperation like that rather than saying we're here ready to cooperate because it doesn't lead to to something. Is it is it also because you're saying this because you think like the we still have like needs for today that needs to be met in order for us to be able to imagine or work towards that bigger horizon that Lorenzo was

mentioning. >> Certainly. Yeah. Um I mean Zavier was talking about this yesterday. um particularly around as we bring resources into these organizations um it's really the individuals that are sustaining these movements that need the resources not the organization itself being fed at the center that takes a a big kind of capacity weight off of people um open civic square in Birmingham is a big great is a great option I think one of the best leaders is is core of civic square and and she talks of saying uh we put in funding bids. We work through our holiday time while

you're on holiday as the philanthropy sector. You come back and tell us we should reduce our wages. Uh we've put huge amounts of volunteer time in. Uh you turn up to our sites wearing fancy coats and on your high wages. >> Um like pushing back at at this within their scheme um through Endowing the Future was a project they ran. uh creating a local endowment to try and find these uh to to to glue together sets of local businesses. Um and where some are struggling at different times recognizing the fact that it's not their individual business model fault.

>> Like most likely it's most likely a rent increase, supplier in cost increase. And there's a part of us that finds it a struggle because entrepreneurship has become such a key kind of identity piece to say I'm struggling as a business. And so we end up finding three six months later that they have to close and there's not much we can do about it now because it was hard to see in that endowing the future work. They were trying to find the points at which the local network could support these people without they them having to say we're struggling. So there's something about our own individual ability to to to admit this to be able to say weakness within the current framing

um that makes it very difficult to to catch the what is still really really valuable and huge amounts of work's gone before it disappears from us and we look back at it and it's yeah we wonder why >> and we and I think often people blame themselves for why but it's often well out of their control because all of this is is entangled. >> I have way more questions, but I'll pass. >> Thank you. Um, I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the differences between doing like a fully new scheme of of new housing versus converting or renovating existing

infrastructure like the houses that you mentioned at the end where there was remediation involved. Just like what are the differences there? And also, is there any like is the idea of regenerating land much of an incentive in these cases or is that just not something that is on most people's radar? Um, new housing on green fields is easier for the developers to develop. It's a pre-made site, so the cost to the developers is lower, but the cost they're passing on is to the people that will live there later. They're passing on the finance. They're passing on the amount of land they paid for the land.

All of this goes into the first home owners or renters and then over time gets diluted until it gets to a point where um it doesn't really matter anymore. But that's the way that the agency model has been set up. Um we can't do that at the scale we need to build the homes that people need. So we have to renovate. Um, but at the same time, renovation is going to eat away at the carbon budgets that we've projected for for the coming decades. So, it's a there's a tense line that sits between that being the lower cost route uh and also this the new build route is way more carbon intensive. Um, so

reusing buildings is often uh the route to go. It's not as glamorous, I think, especially as a as a some of the housing groups that have the resources to be able to do modern development. Uh they much rather do a new build scheme and move into new houses and they're the ones that end up getting the photo opportunities as well. Um but renovation is happening out there. It's just harder to coordinate even for these kind of collaborative housing groups. uh to be able to coordinate an entire street to retrofit. Say wrapping an entire street in insulation and then redoing people's homes. Uh there's good bits of studies on this of where one person disagrees in

that really breaks the entire contract. There's tower blocks where people have been insulated out because they disagree with paying 30,000 or they don't have it, so they can't play with everybody else. And so they end up spending more kind of insulating their box out so they're cold than just insulating the entire thing and and taking because they refuse because they don't want to be insulated and and so that's where the that's where the line sits like really complicated to do renovation, but it's still worth doing. And Civic Square again is like a really good example of doing working on this is it's a coordination like talking uh building trust together that is very difficult to do if you're if you're zooming in and uh

working fast and and trying to reduce your costs. Your second question was a bit different in terms of land restoration. I think you said is it worth doing? uh it's often disconnected. So there'll be tree planting screens uh funding streams, there'll be hedge rows, there'll be other programs for land

restoration that aren't connected to housing or food or energy. So it's often seen in silos that is hard to connect between policy regimes. Uh it's been constantly happening and people that have managed to piece these bits together managed to make it work as an kind of assembled piece. But there's still, I would say, very little connected thinking on this. And also from the community group side, the identity of them saying like we're a foods group or we're an energy group, very rarely do they manage to connect all these things together, especially close to cities. Um I think the rural groups like we've been involved in OASA and TDF, they're trying to create a full picture and there are groups that are emerging that are trying to tell this

story. Um, but from a policy direction, I think it's still really not managing to get the connection between them yet. I haven't seen um you mentioned that there um at the community hub in Birmingham, if I'm not mistaken, that they have a large revenue. I was wondering how does a community hub uh create revenue?

>> So Birmingham was one of the places that was underresourced. Uh leadeds was had a higher revenue from uh a government fund and then from philanthropic entity called power to change. Um so five organizations got funded like hub entities got funded a lot more than the others and that made a big difference to their ability to act. So not really generating revenue but getting donations. >> Just starting. Yeah. With these kinds of hubs just starting. Um at the time when these hubs were setting up the the canny people that were setting them up in

these regions that the the people that were recognizing the opportunity in front of them saw that they just had to take the money and spend it on a localized area knowing that it would disappear. What I saw was that some of the people that were more experienced recognized that this was a short period of money, a small amount of money, and so to get it into homes as quickly as possible was the way. Um, other people tried to create sustainable business plans and multi multiple different types of revenue. It was too short a period. They were supposed to get uh surplus making in five years. It's too short a period to to give them from a standing start. Um and some managed to connect to existing network bodies and they were the most successful that there's already a

capacity and they're building on top of that capacity rather than creating something new. On the whole people created something new and um that hubs network has has largely disappeared now 9 years on from the initial funding. Um you also saw this happen with the cooperative development agencies in the 80s and 90s who ended up chasing um mostly uh employment and other kind of business related working schemes because that was what they could get funding for across the 90s where previously cooperatives were successful on a number of different funding streams on doing housing and other things. by the time they got 20 or 30 years in all that was left in the CDAS they're called was often employment

based work and that's what created revenue streams and in the end those started to run out as well and then it became very difficult to do a a quarter development agency so when I saw these new hubs coming for community housing I looked carefully at the community development agencies to say what was the trajectory across that period um and the ones that stay reliant on government funding and don't manage to create their own independent streams disappear. Yeah, revenue is really important. um you've been you were emphasizing like needing to take a long time scale and

like uh setting up the enabling conditions before just like it's not as simple as just buying buying the property. Can you summarize again like the key takeaways of what those enabling conditions are? Um, and then maybe semi-related is like how do you deal with sort of chicken and egg problems where like in order to have thick relational ties and stuff, it helps to have shared skin in the game of some something that some kind of cooperative project that we're a part of, but we can't start it until we have those ties. Um, yeah.

Um I think it runs both at the same time. So when I mentioned that group that set up an Airbnb house like just to start and to build like start building something that was like wasn't trying to buy land wasn't trying to convert their entire neighborhood but at the same time they were doing full studies of everyone's back gardens to understand what latent capacity was there for holding new development. Um they were lobbying the local government for conditions that they would never benefit from later. personally the people that were were lobbying for them. Um so I think it's about you're right in trying to understand this as being like dependent on being having the condition before you can bend but people just just do it and it it's

hard to do. So just acting is has been a key part of this. Um this isn't something that all communities can do either. Like one of the communities in Birmingham that was trying to do this was also talking about how in their particular neighborhood people had two or three jobs. It was stopping them from connecting with their friends, with their family, with their street. like just the time impetus of having to pay rents, having to pay costs and then so having to do multiple jobs like low-inccome jobs in order to do that was meaning that trying to say that you should affect local policy was something they were trying to do but it didn't meet local material conditions and it was a real struggle for them to do that.

So all of this is is complicated and and implicated within this but um I think this thing of like just starting and also thinking about 20 or 30 years a bit like planting a tree kind of attitude um especially on the as you're going through what would make this better if we had it at the beginning and building that into your model. Almost every group forgets that while they're doing this kind of work and then they finish but they don't leave a overall structure that's possible for someone to join.

That's what we saw in in Berlin in the study is these five organizations weren't thinking about what it would be to make their initial outset much easier had they created something like a a starting fund of sorts for others to be able to start and get the first thing in. Um does that give some tendrils? >> Yeah. I've also given like a lot of uh kind of normative points in this of saying like this can be this way, this should be this way. Obviously in the PhD I framed it in an entirely different way and for this audience I'm trying to like talking

to you as a group is trying to say like what can we do with this? What's the condition? Like how can we understand it? Um and so I've I've made statements as provocations as well to try and understand like what how do we have a chat about it? Thank you. That's everything. [applause] All right. Uh before we go for lunch and I think it's ready. I have [snorts] few announcements.

One, there is a party committee forming. Uh we already have six people uh but more are welcome to join. We want to create uh uh an a comprehensive experience in this room uh that guides us through the night. Um yeah, we will have the brainstorm somewhere later in the afternoon. Uh, no time set yet, but also I promised a tour to the villa at 2:30. Uh, in the living room, we'll gather to go to the villa for about I'd say 45 minutes maybe. Uh, yeah,

2:30 sharpish. And that's it. Enough announcements. Okay questions. Ah, Lorenzo is going to farm lab tomorrow. Is driving to farm labs and then we'll continue going south. So that means some people could come with Lorenzo but can't come back. Uh unless another car is driving. Uh, I'm a bit short on cars cuz I I borrowed uh the small car to Luna and I assume she will also use it tomorrow.

Also, I'm not going to sleep, so I'm not going to drive. But yes, there is an exploration to Farm Labs. Farm Lab is about 2 hours south, less one and a half hours uh to the south. It's definitely worth visiting. Uh if anyone [music] is interested in visiting, talk to Lorenzo and we will find ways of uh getting you back. Maybe you can come back by train, right? Uh and for the ones that were not there yet, Farm Lab is a rural fab lab that is experimenting [music] with uh use of natural uh resources they grow on their farm among others. Uh sheep wool. Um at

the same time it is [music] co-founded by uh uh well two really brilliant people um working in quite different domains um one of them uh uh working on industrial uh 3D printing of of concrete uh whereas that's Martin Sylvia is working more on uh uh well was working on large scale uh uh educational programs in Catalunia uh and in architecture. Sure. Uh yes.

Uh right. Definitely worth a visit. I would love to go but I'll go somewhere else. I think it's realistic. Okay, enough announcements. Have fun. See you later.